A milestone year for Weezevent/PlayPass and NFC cashless adoption by UK festival audiences

A milestone year for Weezevent/PlayPass and NFC cashless adoption by UK festival audiences

Fol­low­ing the merg­er between Weezevent and Play­pass in Decem­ber 2020, the NFC cash­less and access con­trol spe­cial­ists emerged from lock­down to deliv­er their busiest sum­mer of ful­ly cash­less events to date in the UK. A surge of new and exist­ing clients deployed the award win­ning tech­nol­o­gy to enhance their oper­a­tions in a chal­leng­ing season.

The first week­end fol­low­ing the lift­ing of restric­tions at out­door events in the UK saw Weezevent/Playpass return to Stan­don Call­ing and a debut deploy­ment at Shambala’s Camp Kin. This set the prece­dent for a strong run of ful­ly cash­less events stretch­ing into September.

Two thirds of clients in 2021 were new to cash­less. As well as Camp Kin, these includ­ed Val­ley Fest, Gone Wild, High­est Point, Kids Rock, Jersey’s Elec­tric Park and Glasgow’s Play­ground and Craft Beer And Food Truck fes­ti­vals.

Weezevent/PlayPass had also been sched­uled to deliv­er their cash­less ser­vices at Black Deer, 2000Trees, Arc­t­an­gent, Unlocked and the inau­gur­al Boom Vil­lage, but all were post­poned due to Covid.

Smoked & Uncut utilised sev­er­al prod­ucts includ­ing cash­less at the new edi­tion of their sin­gle-day food and music fes­ti­val series, The Pig in Bridge Place.

Fes­ti­val organ­is­er Dave Wilkin­son explained:

“This sum­mer was our sec­ond year work­ing with the team; who have helped us stream­line our fes­ti­vals’ tick­et­ing and cash­less offer­ings. We’ve seen a reduc­tion in attendee queue times, both at entry and ven­dors, increased rev­enue per head and the team are gen­uine­ly great to work with; we’re doing even more events with them in 2022.”

An analy­sis of data from twelve of Weezevent/PlayPass’ UK week­end camp­ing fes­ti­vals showed a rapid­ly advanc­ing mar­ket for cash­less tech­nol­o­gy with increased con­fi­dence amongst festival-goers.

Key insights from these find­ings include:

78% of all cash­less top ups were made online, show­ing the UK’s fes­ti­val-going pub­lic’s trust in the technology.
• Only 1.9% of top ups made onsite were in cash.
• The aver­age fes­ti­val vis­i­tor spent 80% of the mon­ey loaded onto their cash­less account — much of the bal­ance being refund­ed post-event, donat­ed to char­i­ty or put towards next year’s ticket.
• On aver­age spend-per-head was 65% high­er for vis­i­tors that pre-loaded their cash­less account before the event.

“I am so pleased with how hard our teams worked to deliv­er our solu­tions at a record num­ber of fes­ti­vals and events this year — and we still have the World Darts at Alexan­dra Palace to deliv­er lat­er this month. Work­ing with new and exist­ing clients and look­ing at the way our indus­try has had to adapt to what the pan­dem­ic threw at us was fan­tas­tic to see. 2022 is already promis­ing to be busier than ever.”
UK Coun­try Man­ag­er Olly Goddard

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